Warhol, Zizek, and Foster: The Therapeutic Real

Excerpts from the Paper

The beginning:

Humanities 322
Warhol, Zizek, and Foster: The Therapeutic Real
The thesis of this paper is that Andy Warhol’s disaster series is a reminder that nightmarish images need not shatter reality in the traumatic ways identified by
Zizek
in The Desert of the Real. Instead, Warhol’s work in the disaster series affirms
Zizek’s
apparently abandoned pre-9/11 ideas about trauma, images, and repetition:
...a trauma is by definition something one is not able to remember, i.e. to recollect by way of making it part of one’s symbolic narrative; as such, it repeats itself indefinitely, returning to haunt the subject...what repeats itself is the failure, impossibility even, to repeat/recollect the trauma properly (37).
In an interview, Andy Warhol noted of...

The end:

..... is ignorance.
This insight is a powerful and fascinating one, and applies to many of the phenomena discussed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality. Specifically, Nietzsche helps us to understand the common impulse that is at the bottom of the Victorian desire to silence sexuality at the same time that they were talking about so much. The Victorian discourse of sexuality was just a refinement of the Victorian ignorance of sexuality, a more learned way of remaining ignorant. That fact illuminates Foucault’s treatment of sexuality in general and adds a welcome theoretical dimension to it.
References
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Vintage, 2002.